Until we crossed its very threshold the spell of the city held us. Not even the noisome belt of Russian refugee camps and tawdry villas and the unkempt tombs of the Hills of the Dead could shatter the illusion of that splendid skyline. The nearer we approached, the more impressive it became. The long gray line of the old Byzantine walls, the uneven lift of the roofs staggering up and down its seven hills, the swelling domes of mosque and basilica, the slender beauty of countless minarets, the faultless contour of cypress groves and the far blue gleam of the Golden Horn and the Marmora, with the dim background of the Asiatic hills, all combined to mold a picture of piercing loveliness.  
But when we passed through the echoing arch of the Adrianople Gate the spell was broken. Crazy houses toppled over the filth of the streets; a dense mass of unwashed humans eddied to and fro; squalor beggaring description leered from the steep lanes and alleys that branched off from the main streets. A hundred races swarmed about us, vying with one another in wretchedness and misery. Dogs and flies fought in the gutters with children and old people. Beggars whined for baksheesh. Food venders yelled their cries and hawked their unsanitary wares. Every kind of clothing appeared, from greasy European dress to the quaint peasant costumes of south-eastern Europe and Anatolia and all the countries eastwards to the Hindoo Koosh.
 
It was like one's fancies of the Arabian Nights, and yet unlike them. For here was no lavishness of Oriental display, no exotic magnificence, only suffering and want and hunger and disease and smells and a dreadful ugliness that was spiritual as well as physical. It was as if a gigantic, cancerous sore, festering and gangrened through the centuries, had eaten away the vitality of what had once been the richest city in the world. And back and forth in that swarm of humanity's dregs wandered men of the civilization which had prospered outside the pale of Islam, French and British officers, bluejackets, poilus, tommies and an occasional tourist, clinging to a smirking guide.
 
Nikka, riding beside me, viewed the spectacle with cynical detachment.
 
"Seven hundred years ago," he said, "this was incomparably the stateliest, most powerful city in Christendom. It was the center of an Empire that was still able to stand alone, although it had borne the burden of resisting the Moslem attacks on the Western world for more than five hundred years. It enshrined all that was best and most worthy of the ancient Greek and Roman culture. It had a million inhabitants. It had public services, schools, posts, police, drains, water supply. Life was safe, commercial independence and prosperity assured—which was more than could be said for any other community, East or West."
 
"And the Turks made it what it is!" I exclaimed, as Wasso Mikali, leading our little procession, turned off the main street we had been following into one of the stinking, littered lanes that twisted down into shadowy regions of corruption.
 
"Not the Turks! The Turks only finished what others had begun. No, the beginning of what you see around you was made by Hugh's ancestor and his brother knights of the Fourth Crusade, who, instead of fulfilling their vows to journey to the Holy Land, voyaged to Constantinople and overpowered the feeble Emperor of that day, and then sacked and wrecked the city. It was never the same afterward. It never recovered its strength. And when the Crusades finally impelled the concentration of the Moslem power, it became only a question of time before the city must fall. Had it not been for those walls we just passed, it would have fallen a century before it did. In fact, it fell then mainly because there were not enough men to hold the defenses."
 
"What you say is interesting," I said. "For after all, we are coming to-day on Hugh's behalf for pretty much the same object as lured his ancestor. We are hunting the treasure of the city."
 
"But we shall do no harm to any one by taking the treasure," returned Nikka. "What use would it be to these people around us? Would they share it? Never! It would be employed for the pleasures of their masters. The only way to redeem Constantinople is to repopulate."
 
We plunged deeper and deeper into the dark byways, sometimes traversing streets so narrow that pedestrians were compelled to squeeze themselves flat against the house-walls to permit us to pass. In the twilight it was difficult to see far ahead, and at every corner Wasso Mikali raised his voice in a shout of warning. But at last we rode forth into a wider thoroughfare and stopped opposite the gate of a huge, fortress-like building, whose windowless stone walls towered above the surrounding housetops.
 
"The Khan of the Georgians," explained Nikka. "Here we shall be swallowed up in an army of travelers. No one would think of looking for us in such a place."
 
Wasso Mikali made the necessary payment to the porter at the gate, and we rode between the ponderous, steel-bound doors into a courtyard such as you find in a barracks. Around it rose three tiers of galleries, arched in stone, and below them were a succession of stables fronted by sheds and penthouses. Piles of goods lay everywhere, in the courtyard and on the galleries. Horses, mules, oxen and camels neighed, brayed, bellowed and grunted. Men talked in knots on the mucky cobbles of the court, squatted in every gallery or leaned over the railings shouting to each other. Women sat on bales and nursed their infants. Children ran about with the usual ability of children to escape sudden death in dangerous places. It sounded like a boiler factory and an insane asylum holding a jubilee convention.
 
But Wasso Mikali and his young men pushed through the confusion with the same bored air I would have worn in bucking the subway rush, at Grand Central. They appropriated a corner of a stable, and put up the horses, uncinched the packs and climbed a flight of stone stairs to the second floor, where the old Gypsy rented two cubicles, each lighted by a grated window two feet square and containing nothing except some foul straw, from a custodian who looked like the conception of Noah entertained by the artists of the subscription editions of the Holy Bible.
 
Nikka had relapsed so thoroughly to Gypsyism that he professed not to be suspicious of the straw, but at my insistance he procured a worn broom from Father Noah and we swept out the room which had been set aside for Wasso Mikali and ourselves. The six retainers in Wasso's train were given the next cubicle, and they promptly piled into it the straw which we had banished from our room, so I doubt whether our labors produced any benefit, as they spent as much time with us as in their own quarters.
 
Such food as we did not have with us we bought from a general store conducted in an angle of the courtyard, and the cooking was done over a brazier, which, with the necessary charcoal, we rented from Father Noah. When night fell, and the cooking fires blazed out all over the courtyard and in the galleries it was a sight worth coming to Constantinople to see. There was an acrid reek of dung in the air, the sweaty smell of human bodies, the pungent aroma of the charcoal, and an endless babble of voices in a score of tongues and dialects.
 
Afterward some men on our gallery played on bagpipes. From the courtyard came the twanging of simple stringed instruments, and nasal voices lifted in interminable melancholy songs. A woman who was no better than she should have been danced in the light of two flaring kerosene torches by the gate until she won the attention of a bandy-legged Turcoman rug-merchant. A thief attempted to pick the purse of a fat Persian. A Kurdish horse-dealer tried to knife a snarling Greek. And gradually the khan's inmates sought their sleep. Most of them lay in the courtyard or stables beside their animals and goods or else on the galleries. The snores of a score resounded into our cubicle. Yet I slept, awakening at intervals of the night when a child cried for the breast or a camel broke loose and threshed around the courtyard or a party of belated travelers stumbled over the sleepers outside our door.
 
We were astir early in the morning, and before eight o'clock Wasso Mikali, Nikka and I left the khan—Wasso having given strict injunction to his young men to stick to their quarters and discourage any endeavors to make them talk—to cross the Golden Horn to the European quarter of Pera. This walk was no less fascinating than our ride from the Adrianople Gate. It took us through the northeastern half of Stamboul, and after we had passed the lower bridge of boats, into the comparatively civilized conditions of the Galata and Pera areas.
 
But to tell the truth, once we had left Stamboul Nikka and I thought little of our surroundings. Nikka even relinquished some of the wolfish manner which his return to Gypsy life had inspired, and we discussed eagerly, and not for the first time, the possibility that harm had come to Hugh. But our fears were relieved when we came to the corner of the street opposite the hotel, for there by the entrance stood Hugh and Watkins chatting with Vernon King.
 
Nikka led the three of us up to the hotel, shambling ungracefully and goggling at the Western aspect of the building and the people who passed on the sidewalk.
 
"Anybody covering them?" he whispered.
 
I looked around. On the farther curbstone, smoking and pretending to be interested in the passers-by, lounged two individuals who might have been cut from the same pattern as ourselves; and I indicated them to Nikka as I offered him tobacco from the box I carried Balkan-fashion in my waist-sash.
 
"All right," he said, "we must be careful. We'll move up beside Hugh, and when there's nobody in earshot you say what you have to say, speaking to me."
 
We peered open-mouthed into the lobby, gaped at shop-windows and slowly worked to a position close by Hugh and Vernon King. I was amused to observe that Watkins confined his attention to th............